Gothicka

Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural

Victoria Nelson

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780674725928, 9780674050143
• eBook ISBN: 9780674069602
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria gótica, romántica y de terror

The Gothic, Romanticism's gritty older sibling, has flourished in myriad permutations since the eighteenth century. In Gothicka, Victoria Nelson identifies the revolutionary turn it has taken in the twenty-first. Today's Gothic has fashioned its monsters into heroes and its devils into angels. It is actively reviving supernaturalism in popular culture, not as an evil dimension divorced from ordinary human existence but as part of our daily lives.

To explain this millennial shift away from the traditionally dark Protestant post-Enlightenment Gothic, Nelson studies the complex arena of contemporary Gothic subgenres that take the form of novels, films, and graphic novels. She considers the work of Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer, graphic novelists Mike Mignola and Garth Ennis, Christian writer William P. Young (author of The Shack), and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. She considers twentieth-century Gothic masters H. P. Lovecraft, Anne Rice, and Stephen King in light of both their immediate ancestors in the eighteenth century and the original Gothic-the late medieval period from which Horace Walpole and his successors drew their inspiration.

Fictions such as the Twilight and Left Behind series do more than follow the conventions of the classic Gothic novel. They are radically reviving and reinventing the transcendental worldview that informed the West's premodern era. As Jesus becomes mortal in The Da Vinci Code and the child Ofelia becomes a goddess in Pan's Labyrinth, Nelson argues that this unprecedented mainstreaming of a spiritually driven supernaturalism is a harbinger of what a post-Christian religion in America might look like.

NOTES

PREFACE

In John Gross, ed., The Oxford Book of Essays (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1992), 372.

1. G. K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” ibid.

1. WHITE DOG, THE PREQUEL

“Terrorist Novel Writing,” letter to the editor, Spirit of the Public Journals for 1797 (London, 1798), 1:223–225, reprinted in E. J. Clery and Robert Miles, eds., Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 184.

1. Fred Botting, “Gothic Culture,” in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, eds., The Routledge Companion to Gothic (New York: Routledge, 2007), 199.

2. Walpole’s status as the founder of a genre the majority of whose early proponents were women has been attacked as a “patriarchal creation myth” by Anne Williams in Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 10. But in Devendra Varma’s view, Walpole’s bold hiccup of originality did not invent the Gothick mode; it “merely outstripped a gradual accumulation of influences,” chief among them the Graveyard poetry school of the 1740s. The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England: Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences (Methuen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1987 [1957]), 41.

3. That is, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The “Gothic” style of sacred architecture actually spanned the twelfth through sixteenth centuries. The term “Middle Ages” itself was coined by the fifteenth-century Italian historian Flavio Biondo to further downplay the thousand-year period of European history following the Roman empire as a less important cultural gray zone between two great eras. And if all this isn’t confusing enough, the Tudor-Elizabethan sixteenth century in England was not dubbed a Renaissance until the nineteenth century; nowadays, coupled with the fifteenth, it goes by the plain-Jane label “premodern.”

4. Radcliffe herself, curiously, was less dogmatic on the subject in her “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” set up as an exchange between two travelers and first published as an essay, then as a prologue to her last novel, Gaston de Blondville. The more eloquent of the two, Mr. W., avers about the ghost of Hamlet’s father: “I do not absolutely know that spirits are permitted to become visible on earth; yet that they may be permitted to appear for very rare and important purposes … cannot be impossible, and, I think, is probable.” New Monthly Magazine 16, no. 1 (January 1826), reprinted in Clery and Miles, eds., Gothic Documents, 167.

5. Charlotte Dacre, The Libertine, in Gary Kelly, ed., Varieties of Female Gothic, vol. 3: Erotic Gothic (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002), 264.

6. Since its inception, the Gothick is a genre that has been written by and for the very young. Matthew Lewis was nineteen when he wrote The Monk, as was Mary Shelley when she began Frankenstein (the novel was published three years later); Stephenie Meyer was twenty-four when the first novel of the Twilight series was published.

7. See, e.g., the last sentence of Otranto: “Theodore’s grief was too fresh to admit the thought of another love; and it was not until after frequent discourses with Isabella of his dear Matilda, that he was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one, with whom he could for ever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul.” Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. Michael Gamer (London: Penguin, 2001), 123.

8. Cf. Coleridge’s “Christabel,” Byron’s “The Giaour,” and Keats’s “Lamia” and “The Eve of St. Agnes,” among many other examples.

9. Among the many scholars who combine the two sensibilities, see, e.g., Emma McEvoy, “Gothic and Romantic,” in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, eds., The Routledge Companion to the Gothic (London: Routledge, 2007), 20, and Williams, Art of Darkness.

10. David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman, 1980), 25.

11. Just like the terms Gothic, medieval, and Renaissance, the label Romanticism was applied to this aesthetic sensibility not by its proponents but by critics and historians well after it had passed its peak.

12. Punter, Literature of Terror, 14.

13. As Robert Bork has shown in his radical studies of cathedral ground plans in The Geometry of Creation: Architectural Drawings and the Dynamics of Gothic Design (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Press, 2010).

14. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion, 1959), 47.

15. After Jane Austen’s satire Northanger Abbey (finished by 1803; published posthumously in 1818), the definitive Victorian parody of Gothick ghosts remains Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–1902), which presents a seemingly supernatural scare (killer ghost animal roaming the lonely moors) only to expose them as the props of a cunning murderer—a classic illustration of the “explained supernatural” ploy.

16. Alexandra Warwick, “Victorian Gothic,” in Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, eds., The Routledge Companion to Gothic (London: Routledge, 2007), 34. I discuss the displacement of the numinous onto the Divine Machine in detail in The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), chaps. 11 and 12.

17. Night of the Werewolf and The Lazarus Plot, respectively, both published by Grosset and Dunlap.

18. Psychoanalysis as a system, Lévy says, “can be read as a universal Gothic mechanism, inside which women and men [italics his] have been struggling since time immemorial: the villain is the super-ego, the victim is the ego entrapped in the psyche—an enclosed, nocturnal place, which has the dimensions and haunting quality of a castle. A very gothic castle, peopled with the ghosts of past traumatic experiences and the suppressed thought or desires that swarm about the subterranean shadowy regions of the unconscious.” “FAQ: What Is Gothic?” Anglophonia 15 (2004): 24, 25.

19. Walpole, “Preface to the Second Edition,” Otranto, 9.

20. Among any number of acknowledgments of this mainstreaming, see, e.g., Alexandra Alter, “The Season of the Supernatural,” Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304520804576343310420118894.html?KEYWORDS=summer+books (accessed May 28, 2011).

21. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 250.

22. In Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Liter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Epigraph
• One: White Dog, the Prequel
• Two: Faux Catholic
• Three: Gothick Gods
• Four: Decommissioning Satan
• Five: Gothick Romance
• Six: The Bright God Beckons
• Seven: Postapocalyptic Gothick
• Eight: The Gothick Theater of Halloween
• Nine: The Ten Rules of Sitges
• Ten: Cathedral Head
• Eleven: The New Christian Gothick
• Twelve: Epilogue
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index